If you look at the systems which recent advances have allowed humans to produce, you can easily see that the most valuable and desirable goods require highly integrated sub-assemblies and components, and the end products have high part counts. Your cellphone or computer alone is made up of hundreds or thousands of components, each requiring highly complex R&D and production, your car has 10k parts, an airplane 500k parts, and a space shuttle has 2000k parts. As a result, creating modern goods requires an ever-increasing number of 'steps', which in turn requires ever-increasing capital investment in R&D and production. We should be encouraging this investment if we want to continue to make more advanced and complex products available to everyone (including consumers).